ART of WAR - Information in Offensive & Defensive Applications

“Know your enemy, know yourself; one hundred battles, one hundred victories.”

This popular maxim from Sun Tzu’s Art of War provides the essence for information operations (IO). IO is the effort to increase the amount of true knowledge of a scenario while simultaneously impairing the adversary’s knowledge in order to create a strategic advantage for friendly participants. Because I link my definition to the concept of principles of war, I will also critically examine Robert Leonhard’s opinion of the immutable principles of warfare.

The more one knows about a subject or situation, the more likely he or she can choose the correct course of action. My definition above assumes that accurate and timely intelligence is a fundamental principle of international interaction (of which war is a significant part). It therefore follows that, in war, opponents will seek to optimize their knowledge while simultaneously attempting to degrade, distort, or disrupt (not all inclusive) the adversary’s situational awareness. The advantage of accurately knowing the strategic landscape pays dividends in international relations. My definition avoids military related terms like “forces,” “battlespace,” “enemies,” to highlight the fact the information operations are not limited to military operations.

In fact, the military definition of information operations is still limited based on function. The Department of Defense IO is the “integrated employment, during military operations, of information related capabilities (IRCs) in concert with other lines of operation to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision making of adversaries and potential adversaries while protecting our own” (JP 313, 2014, p. ix). The U.S. Army War College’s Information Operations Primer echoes this definition by stating “Information Operations are the integration of capabilities involving information and information systems in order to gain a military advantage” (2011, p. 3).

The problems with both are that they only include the military sphere and they revolve around a specific capability and function: IRCs and the military sphere respectively. A capabilitybased definition excludes other lowtech or other creative methods that rely on or contribute to information operations. Further, limiting the sphere to the military sector removes the other instruments of power. This is a mistake because it could lead to departmental rivalry which decreases cooperation and the shared level of strategic knowledge. It also reduces the ability to leverage the state’s total “soft power” assets (Gomichon, 2013). Unlike the DoD’s definition, Robert Leonhard’s definition is appropriately broad. He writes IO includes “political and social dimensions…and embraces psychological operations, media relations, and civil affairs” (2000, p. 23).

Although Robert Leonhard appropriately labels IO to include an encompassing view, he spends an inordinate amount of energy to incorrectly lambasting the concept of immutable principles of war. He writes that “either principles of war had changed…or they do not lead to advantage in combat” (Leonhard, 200, p. 5). There is a third option: military leaders either misconstrued the principles of war or failed to correctly apply them. IO is very much an activity that has pervaded the centuries. Leonhard himself points to ancient armies sacking resistant cities while sparing passive cities. His use of historic successes to prove his own point while criticizing those who “cherry pick” their own examples is hypocritical. He believes that the Army’s principles of war ought to be revised (Leonhard, 2000). In this respect, we agree, but probably for different reasons. I would argue it is because it fails the third option mentioned above. The use of ancient information operations such as scouts, propaganda, or aggressive signaling shows that the pursuit of knowledge and the degradation of the enemy’s knowledge is a fundamental principle of international interaction.

References:

Gomichon, Maxime. 2013. "Joseph Nye on Soft Power" on eInternational Relations.

Leonhard, Robert. 2000. The Principles of War for the Information Age. Novato, Calif.: Novato Press.

U.S. Army. 2011. Information Operations Primer: Fundamentals of Information Operations.

U.S. Department of Defense. 2014. Joint Publication 313, Information Operations. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense.